Minister: Iraq Wants U.S. Business

SELCAN HACAOGLU

Published 7:00 pm, Monday, September 9, 2002

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ Iraq wants business, not war, with the United States, its foreign minister said, while Saudi Arabia on Tuesday joined European countries in saying Washington should work through the United Nations to contain any possible Iraqi threat.

The Bush administration, trying to build world support as it considers military action to oust Saddam Hussein, says debate among its allies has shifted from a question of whether the United States should confront Iraq to how.

Arab nations have staunchly opposed any military action against the Iraqi leader, saying it would throw the Middle East into turmoil. The Saudi foreign minister on Tuesday expressed fears an attack would lead to the dismemberment of Iraq _ but he suggested his country would follow the United Nations' lead in the crisis.

"If there is an operation, the decision has to be taken by the United Nations," Prince Saud al-Faisal said in Paris after a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac.

Al-Faisal said an approach through the world body was "absolutely not contradictory" to U.S. wishes to see a resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq or to prevent the breakup of the country.

Iraq "is an important country of the Middle East and it can be feared that military action would undermine Iraq's territorial and national integrity," he said.

Leaders from France, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands denounced Saddam in exceptionally blunt terms this week, saying he poses a threat with his alleged drive to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But the leaders suggested Washington first seek U.N. backing for any action.

Russia and China oppose any attack on Baghdad and both hold veto powers on the U.N. Security Council. Russia's First Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov said in an interview published Tuesday that an American strike could split the international anti-terrorism coalition.

European Commission President Romano Prodi, speaking to Portuguese radio station TSF Tuesday, said he opposes unilateral U.S. military action against Iraq and wants Washington to ensure the support of the Security Council and the United States' allies.

Senior U.S. administration officials said Bush, in an address Thursday to the U.N. General Assembly, planned to urge the United Nations to demand that Saddam open his weapons sites to unfettered inspections or face punitive action. But he was not expected to set a deadline, as Chirac has reportedly proposed.

Iraq says reports that it holds chemical and biological weapons and is seeking to develop nuclear weapons are lies spread by the United States and its closest ally, Britain, to justify an attack.

Then he quickly corrected himself and said: "We do not want to fight anybody, we do not hope that a war is waged against our country. We'd like to live in stability. We'd like to live in peace."

He said Iraq was hoping to revive the good trade ties it enjoyed with the United States before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The United States led the 1991 Gulf War that forced Iraq out of Kuwait.

"We've been doing this with the United States up to 1990, we've been importing one-fourth of all American exports of rice … Americans were importing more than 60 percent of our oil exports," Sabri said. "We can do business again."

Sabri said Iraq has denounced terrorism and expressed condolences for the American people who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack last year.

The United States accuses Saddam of sponsoring terrorism as well as possessing weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has launched a campaign trying to refute the claims.

Reporters in Baghdad Monday were escorted on a tour of a site Iraqi defectors say was a terrorist training camp. The Iraqi government claims the camp 25 miles east of Baghdad was used to train security forces to respond to hijackings.

On another tour Monday, reporters were show new buildings at a site Iraq said corresponded with construction visible in satellite photos that had concerned U.N. nuclear weapons inspectors. Reporters were told the new buildings were devoted to peaceful research at what was once a nuclear facility.

In a report released Monday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading independent center for strategic analysis, said Iraq could assemble a nuclear weapon within months if it could steal or buy radioactive material, and it is working to develop equipment to make bomb components.

Sabri said such assessments "are pretexts for … aggression against our country, they know very well that these are false pretexts, false accusations."

"We challenge them to present one piece of evidence, a single piece of evidence for these accusations," Sabri said.

Iraq agreed to weapons inspections after the Gulf War, but the inspectors left in December 1998 complaining of lack of Iraqi cooperation ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes. Baghdad has not allowed them back.

Sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait cannot be lifted until the inspectors certify Baghdad has surrendered nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

Iraq has denied it still has weapons of mass destruction and has offered to continue dialogue with the United Nations about the return of inspectors. But the United Nations refuses Iraq's position that the issue be tied to ending sanctions and says inspectors must be allowed to return first.